Who would have figured Hal 9000 for a cheaty space cheater at Rock Paper Scissors? At least he can sort of help us fire the Genesis Rocket.. Dangit, who opened up an inter-dimensional portal filled with puzzles?
The Games Showcased:
[The Edge of Earth 5000] by Hypno Hustla
[Tangled Mini Worlds] by Lars Kristian
[Trappy Tomb] by Jimmy Paulin
With less than a day left before judging ends, I figured I’d share the timelapse recap I made of the livestream of my friend and I making Melody’s Long Ladder Home using Stencyl. It’s just the entire 12-plus hour livestream (done over three days), condensed into less than 23 minutes.
If you still want to try our game, you can try it here.
Tags: jam, LD30, postmortem, stencyl, timelapse
A bunch more progress with my Post-Compo Ludum Dare release, and a demo available (by demo I mean it’s incomplete-final release will still be free).
Elements-a major part of the final experience are still missing as I ran into constant issues with the system and decided to work around it for now, balancing out the rest of the game. So you can now progress through the worlds by defeating boss enemies-which spawn after defeating a certain amount of minions, and you’re able to choose which stat to invest in (which will be able to complement your play style more so when elements are added).
Below you can see a video showing the latest progress.
It’s incomplete but it’s at a good point to start receiving feedback on the current experience, so if you’d like to try it out you can download this demo here for PC – https://www.dropbox.com/s/i3q8mm0dbv6kek9/RageDOWPostCompoDemo.zip?dl=0
—Controls (keyboard | controller)–
Movement— w/a/s/d | Left Joystick
Camera— Mouse | Right Joystick
Invert Vertical Camera Motion— Middle Mouse Button | R3
Swing Attack— Left Mouse Button | R2
Strike Attack— Right Mouse Button | R1
Jump— Spacebar | L1
—Gameplay Notes–
This shows your combat data indicators – http://i.imgur.com/mJTzMIY.png
This shows you what chests are available to get and how they help you – http://i.imgur.com/aRvDg1p.png
Currently there is no ‘end world’, however the final build is planned for you to only combat 5 worlds before facing the final enemy. It’s intended to be a challenge to reach that point and your score will be based upon how many enemies you defeated.
Currently you intentionally don’t die, so that you can continue forward and balance the difficulty growth of enemies throughout each world/how the stat increases balance, etc, without worrying so much about death. It’s more a test of how it feels currently.
I really hope you enjoy this latest update to the project and I look forward to rounding out the experience further for its completion soon 
EDIT: A small update but one worth mentioning, made some balance changes and spiced up the variety in boss battles, now you’ll begin to face enemies who can only be damaged by the boss’s attacks. I’ve replaced the video here and updated the download with the latest build, hope you enjoy the changes.
Why this game ?
I had this idea for almost a year(initially a board game) but wasn’t getting an occasion to develop it(probably because of other games(college projects)).
What this game is about ?
As the theme for ludum dare 30 is connected worlds, I tried my best to make the game as per the theme.
The game depicts a fight between three worlds. Three worlds fighting with each other to decided who’s superior.
The tokens can only move to the world’s which are connected to the block it’s already in/
Problems Faced
The initial(and primary) problem was the user input, I was not able to find a solution on how to move the tokens.
Solution – Created the red blocks for each block and turned them into buttons with each button hard coded with a function (there was no time for experiment).
The player turns were not in proper cycle. e.g. if all the tokens of a player are removed and his turn comes, he cannot move his tokens, hence, the game wouldn’t progress.
Solution – Solved using Boolean values and permutation & combination.
Link to the game – Triple Threat
And after you’ve played my game, you can ponder these stats:
This shows what percentage of contestants have commented on others games.
I had suspected that a lot of players comment in quick succession on different games, suggesting that they hadn’t actually played them in any depth. However, thankfully, the stats really don’t back that up. There are some examples, but really surprisingly rare. People really don’t sit down and speed-rate and comment a lot of games; lets hope for the best that they are playing them instead 😉
As my game relies on people commenting, I’m eager to get everyone commenting. Here’s my game’s penetration:
We are tracking the location of 721 LD30 contestants.
524 contestants have successfully used the game, entering their user name and looking at the map; that’s 20% !!!
56% of these have been back more than once! The median is 3 repeat visits!
450 contestants have updated their location in the game; the other 74 were satisfied with the game’s guess.
But, here’s the kicker, only 324 have rated my game 
And only 202 people have have commented on my game. A handful are not contestants, but the rest … I can’t see you light up on my map Here’s how my map is lit up when I check it now:
I would like you all to go comment on other people’s game, not just my own!
Last Day Now… you know what to do!
ah well
Out of all the themes this LD, the only one I had a solid idea for was “Lost In Space.” I had even made a detailed design document with all of the controls, mechanics, level design and goals outlined. So when I found out that the theme was “Connected Worlds” I had no ideas; all I could think about was my “Lost In Space” idea. So I repurposed my idea to work with “Connected Worlds.” Basically you play as a single astronaut in a ghetto spaceship that was sent on a mission to reconnect two planets by deploying a communications satellite. These planets used to be connected by a single satellite but it broke, disconnecting these planets from each other.
I made this game in Unity in around ~35 hours.
What Went Well:
-Physics! Unity’s physics is a key part in this game!
-The Satellite controls. Deploying the satellite and manoeuvring it is very lifelike and a lot of fun.
-The Spacescapes. They are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.
-The Satellite Model. I really like it!
What Didn’t Go Well:
-Physics. Sometimes the ship’s physics glitches and it starts spinning and flipping. This is really cool for the player inside the ship but it ruins the game.
-Textures. Why do spaceships have so many textures!
-The glass effect on the window. I needed something to make the windows look windowy. This did the job but I don’t like it very much.
Now, if you haven’t played Satellite yet you can play it here!
Tags: connectedworlds, lostinspace, postmortem, satellite
I posted some thoughts about the LD48 midgord vikings blog post. It’s pretty cool how adjusting simple things (like character controls), the game becomes much more playable. In the original version, it’s clear that scrolling the screen is a problematic. I made changes so that you move only one character, and camera moves alongside.
That alone makes the movement much better.
No post compo version available yet, but feel free to try out the original jam entry: available here.
I know the results are coming soon, and because of that I decided to publish a playthrough of my entry, PitBall, which is also my second participation, in case you are looking for more games to play and rate before the rating time ends. If you want to play quickly, there’s a web version.
Hi! There is only 8h left for voting! Please, rate our game. Just look at the dog, isn’t he cute? 😉
Boy and Dog and Mysterious portal
I have been working on the post-compo version for some time. It’s been a lot of fun in making a small 48-hour compo work into a bigger version.
Indeed, I learned a lot of new stuff in expanding this game. And when I say “Learned a lot”, it means I encountered a lot of weird problems and killed an army of nasty bugs.
Yeah, I have to say I’m really lucky to not face them in the compo time. Just 1/3 of them and I will be bound to fail in submitting a playable game.
Anyway, please take a look at what I’ve made until now, and I will be very grateful if you could give some suggestion and feedback
Play the post-compo version here or tmpxyz.itch.io/universal-gravitation
Oh, almost forget to mention: I have prepared a cake here by the tradition, LOL, just kidding.
Hi there! Thanks for rating us, this ludum dare has been hectic!!
With less than 8 hours to go you can still rate our game here:
Rate Alice Anxiety now!
A post-compo version is on the way, probably will be posted after the results go live. Check us again later for more info!
Some of you may remember during LD29 I had a crack at predicting some of the highest rated entries using machine learning. Specifically, I dumped out a list of entries predicted to be in the top 10th percentile based on Overall score, using only words in the comments (adjectives and adverbs) that were predicted using K-nearest neighbour classification based on a model trained with LD15-LD28 comments and scores. Phew. Deep breath.. I never did the followup post to look at just how many I got correct.
It turned out in my rush to do something before judging ended last time, I’d made some errors when training the model (mostly to do with dealing with Overall(Jam) vs. Overall scores and unrated entries). Embarrassing, but hey, it’s a work in progress, Caveat emptor :). As a result, this list is different to the original one I posted (with some overlap) .. however since ratings were available, I could see which of the predictions were actually correct:
Correct predictions, LD29 compo and jam combined (128):
These were correctly predicted to be in the top 10th percentile.
Hypnohustla, DannyG59, ApoorvaJ, Alex Rose, Zarkith, Snowflower, Tomski, rubna, Overkill, PlasterPhantom, snapman_GT, Lama, ix, Robinerd, Eirikir, Gabriel, GamerTaters, Mental Atrophy, Solifuge, GertJohnny, xdegtyarev, ilovepixel, TeamInCharge, Pierrec, bitserum, petey123567, Nition, Cambrian_Man, flrn, quill18, GarethIW, 01101101, IAmSpencer, Lyje, _Rilem, voidqk, HacksawUnit, SaintHeiser, Xaychru04, Mikhail Lyubimov, Maschinen-Mensch, 7elephants, Andrew Shouldice, Elisée, savethejets1, baykush_figtree, orangepascal, geekdrums, Helopol, Danman9914, Frump, TijmenTio, Ellian, Hemuuuli, SecondDimension, Mase, Yword, bvanschooten, Double Zero One Zero, oatsbarley, TheGreenTie, DragonXVI, zillix, Benjamin, TobiasW, Evilion, ZYXer, Mr. Jif, quickfingers, KickBack, j_peeba, Ditto, Dreauw, dukope, Jezzamon, Wolve, TeamPurpleDolphins, Raiyumi, Knighty, nka, StudioWolfox, deepnight, Draknek, Miltage, arkeus, CryoGenesis, UltimateWalrus, Turnipnose, DrPrettyPatty, 01010111, Ludonaut, Oddly Shaped Pixels, Bekokstover, oostap, Pixlexia, lajos, jsmars, Toki Anholmes, Dr_V, Zednaut, DDRKirby(ISQ), Romko Pidstryhach, Make A Game, torcado194, Managore, SteveSalmond, NickZangus, EpaceGames, rpgwhitelock, Jools64, TeamFlare, Cake&Code, jahlgren, mark.goetz, radmars, InfectionTeam, greysphere, BumbleBirds, Diptoman, Flai, Almost, Catman, _adamturnbull, Valandre, Split82, lucienpro, SimonLarsen, Aomeas
Incorrect predictions, LD29 compo and jam combined (162):
These were predicted to be in the top 10th percentile, but weren’t.
gigitrix, X54321, SonnyBone, elefantopia, SunShiranui, brofist56489, Beavl, d__adee, hampa, eteeski, Otrora Interactivo, kiririn51, Agecaf, Indie Squid, halfmage, Snoother, Photon, Coin Flip Games, TheElephantSeal, Glint Games, Gap, haloflooder, Tuism, ToOB, joe40001, TowelKing, Christina Antoinette Neofotistou, cwkx, Ithildin, javierecf, Zelun, mr_tag, conormn, Robotic, tylerb1, jackolondon, enderosc, NeiloGD, Liens, zn01wr, Dualhammers, Jakub Koziol, Sparrow, Lerc, tacs, teambrookvale, MrShoestore, rico.albe, Nik Sudan, mir007, John Drury, eufrik, Chinchilla, Secret_Tunnel, Colorvade, thinkster, grozamorei, Tweak, admung, allurious, Kino333, praporomsk, Akz-, Woftles, NoahC_, AhNinniah, Bruno Massa, Cawrtz, BillToWin, Striwx, ErikU, SalamiChild, CitrusPossum, lightsoda, FGM, NiceAlexanderAS, nddrylliog, Mapboy, Figglewatts, goerp, Thomas Ingham, abrie, malmazuke, Zekronz, harleylaurie, wimnea, Mlle Eole, Recursiveanomaly, berareu, AgentParsec, Noah Ratcliff, Lrnk, Erfeo, Rahazan, Magdev, madjackmcmad, Joe Williamson, DarkMeatGames, Stuffie, angelk, twelveplusplus, Colthor, camlang, magicspark, DNA Yarn, LazyParia, Zampi, suurin, Linus Lindberg, Joshua_Burr, eastes, BlazeCell, Zutty, myachin, Sodaware, WhiteWolf93, TheMarvellousTeam, PriorBlue, Christophe, Hyoga-3D, StoneMasters, mcapraro, iossif, Exeneva, Kyatric, Dark Arts and Sciences, Typedeaf, Balloonsfor600, tenpn, ShivanHunter, Nuclear_Hammer, TheH, td1801, Dailydo, WetDesertRock, DarkUser, Benn, mortus, sockfolder, lief, jtpup0, petrih, MintArcade, LTyrosine, sirdorius, Nizar89, FistBumpGames, archaeometrician, jurnacsr, Pent, Cherno, brother.byto, Thijsku, Muu?, Kevlanche, louis.denizet, SuperIzzo, geounknown, BuKaneerz, daandruff, BrothersT, Detocroix
Summary: It looks like I can use the comments on entries to guess if any one entry will be in the top 10th percentile with about 50/50 chance of getting it right.
Next post … LD30 predictions using the same method !
Tags: predictions
Ludum dare is almost over… Well.. If you don’t played parallel worlds yet, click on image and try it!
Thank to you dear player.
Thanks to everyone who rated my game.
Thanks to other developers for amazing work.
and…
Thanks for the ludum dare.
I’ll be back on #31 !
Ludum Dare is awesome. A welcomed challenge every four months. In order to improve my skill at design, I spend most of my time creating simple prototypes to learn what does and doesn’t work. This has benefitted me immensely and I remained convinced that it is the right route to becoming a better designer. The downside to this practice is that I don’t have much to show for it. Raw prototypes don’t show off very well. However, Ludum Dare gives me the opportunity to release a game, even if it’s a short web game. It’s nice to be able to show people something with a little bit more polish to it.
For Ludum Dare 30 I created 100 Days. You are the EAS Indomitable, the first human vessel to explore deep space. Disaster strikes and you must survive for 100 Days before home base can warp the Indomitable back to safety.
What went right?
Scope
When the theme was released at 6pm I did not go anywhere near a computer. Since I have been making it a habit to design on paper every detail that will be in my prototypes, I didn’t see why I should do it any different for a LD game. Especially given the short time limit, I wanted every aspect of the game thought out upfront. If I missed some detail then I would consider that a failure. Before touching a computer I had the actions listed, the resources that would be used, the costs of moves, combat details, and even had drawn what I wanted the UI to look like. Because of this upfront effort, there were less surprises and I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done by when.
Though knowing when features needed to be done didn’t mean they would be done in time. I also executed the features in scope efficiently. As a programmer, it’s really easy to get caught up in doing things the “right” way. Spending the extra time to make sure architect is clean or making sure the code runs as optimally as possible. KISS: Keep it simple stupid, especially for a game jam. The gains you get by doing it “correct” is not often worth the time spent.
The world generation for 100 Days is hardly optimal or even elegant. In a 200×200 space, random worlds are created based off of a probability curve which decreases the further away from the origin. Then another pass marks worlds that are connected to the origin world. Yet another pass will then walk from each world that isn’t connected to the origin and walk towards the origin until it hits a world that is connected. To make sure that the player can traverse at any depth a circle of worlds is created every 10 nodes. Finally, to keep options open for the player, random worlds are selected and additional worlds are generated walking away from the selected world.
Now I have very little experience with procedural generation. I do not know any common practices, algorithms, or techniques. My approach to the world generation was simply the most obvious option that came to me. I am absolutely sure that there are far more calculations than necessary, probably even redundant calculations, but I do not care. I had the entire world generation code completed before I went to the bed on the first night. A huge part of what I needed in the game, completed in a few hours. The negative impact of my straight forward obvious approach? 2.5 seconds. According to my analytics, the average load time for users was 2.5 seconds before they can play the game. I can live with that. To further drive this point, the AI uses limited DFS to find the player. I didn’t even attempt to use a heuristic which would not have been hard since I know where the player is. I didn’t need to. The game ran at 60 fps with the simple searching.
Though more than just programming features contribute to scope. Content is expensive. It takes time to build a diverse world, write an interesting script, or to have a wide variety of challenges. That’s not to say focusing on any of these for a Ludum Dare is a bad idea. We all want these things for our games, but it’s easy to forget or underestimate just how costly content can be. 100 Days was kept purposefully simple. The story was brief, only a few enemies and they all behaved the same way, and no sprite animations were created. Keeping an eye on how much content I’d have kept creating 100 Days in 48 hours possible.
Time Management
I see a lot of people who sleep little or none at all and work themselves past the point of exhaustion. This is not the way to handle a Ludum Dare. I understand why this happens, you only have two or three days to complete a game. Time is precious and you have very little of it. It’s easy to think that you need to spend more and more hours to complete your entry. I’d argue that doing this hurts your output and you can get more quality work completed by spending less time working on it. I make sure to get a full night’s rest every night, I regularly take breaks, and I’ll try to make sure I have a wind down period where I’ll do something else before going to bed. The thing is if I’m tired I’ll make mistakes. If I make mistakes I’ll get frustrated. If I’m frustrated then I’ll make more mistakes. The worst of it is if I’m frustrated then I’m not having fun. If I’m not having fun then I don’t want to participate. Sleeping and taking breaks both improved my output and made the whole competition more enjoyable.
Polish
In my opinion polish is the single most important aspect of a Ludum Dare game, in terms of being judged. I have seen otherwise uninteresting games receive high praise because of how polished the entry was. This isn’t really surprising. When most players only spend a few minutes on an entry it’s critical to leave an immediate impression and that’s where polish shines.
However, polish isn’t free and takes time to do. So it’s important to pick your polish battles carefully and even more important to pick your tools carefully. Leveraging cheap polish techniques can make your game feel much more complete without a huge time cost. For 100 Days I heavily leveraged tweening. For everything from moving, combat, to zooming the camera. Carefully picking an easing function for your tween can give your animations more flavor and improve the general feel of the game. Particle emitters are another great tool for creating quick and effective polish. In 100 Days the engines and explosions were created using very simple particle emitters.
What went wrong?
Understandability
This is problem that just continues to haunt me and it reared its ugly head for 100 Days. It’s a goal of mine to make the interaction with the game intuitive enough to not require a separate tutorial screen. As a player I am annoyed when its necessary for me to look at instructions outside the actual game itself. To combat against needing a screen outside of the game, I implemented a help section in the UI that prompted text when the player hovered over an object. However, that only works if players realizes it is there and understood how to make use of it. Some noticed and figured it out, others didn’t. Those who didn’t struggled to grasp the resource aspect of the game leading to a degraded experience.
To improve on the understandability of my games, I think using more assets to be as clear as possible about how the interactions with the game works. I didn’t want the player to learn that they die if their fuel hits zero. I wanted the player to learn how to prevent their fuel from reaching zero. Using simple art assets to clearly show the next valid movements or larger icons for resources on planets can go far for understandability. It may not be elegant, but having a prompt that the player must click through that explicitly stated that additional help text is supplied on hovering could have made 100 Days much more approachable.
Grammar / Typos
This one is pretty embarrassing. The typos I really have no excuse for. The grammar I can at least claim ignorance, for what that’s worth. Luckily the typos are an easy fix that really comes at no cost. I need to write all my content in a proper word processor that can detect misspelled words. Easy. Grammar is trickier but a problem I want to solve. Writing more and having people proofread will help me with grammar. This postmortem has an excellent exercise on its own, and yes, I have a friend who has been proofreading it for me. Though he didn’t have time to check out this final version, so we’ll see how it goes.
Analytics
This probably seems like an odd entry for a Ludum Dare postmortem but it’s certainly an area I came up short. Earlier in this postmortem I wrote, in great length, about implementation efficiency and time management. So why would I even be concerned about adding analytics to my game when it takes time? Because information is power. A big reason I participate in Ludum Dare is that it gives me a chance to try new ideas and when I try out an idea I want to learn from it. Analytics is another tool to help with learning about your game’s successes and failures. Anything that helps me learn is worth my time.
However, analytics only helps you learn if you gather actionable data, with actionable being the key word. I didn’t really have a plan when I started placing analytics into 100 Days. I basically decided to record as much as I could and hope that it was useful later. Some of the analytics worked out alright, as I mentioned earlier it took an average of 2.5 seconds for players to load my game. That was useful to know because it justified my decision to not optimize the world generator. But most of the data didn’t help me out in the end. Knowing that over 2000 extractions have occurred in my game is cool but not useful. What would have been useful? Analytics around the user experience. How long did it take before the player hovered over an item to read the help text? How often did the player do it? I knew fuel was the most important resource to manage, how many attempts did it take for players to learn this? Hindsight makes it easy, but these were the important questions.
My whole approach on how to add analytics to a game needs to change. Much like designing, this is going to require me to step away from the computer and truly think about. I need to sit down and ask myself what is it that I really want to know? And if I can learn the answer, what can I do about it? Once I have the questions that lead to actionable answers, I can start figuring out what data would help me answer the questions. As good analytics can help me improve everywhere, doing this correctly is perhaps the most important thing I can take away from this Ludum Dare.
Here’s my predictions for the LD30 top 10th percentile, as part of my ongoing pet project to use machine learning to predict ratings from comments (first post, code). These entries are predicted to be in the top 10th percentile based on Overall score, using only words in the comments (adjectives and adverbs) that were predicted using K-nearest neighbour classification based on a model trained with LD15-LD28 comments and scores. I’ve split them up into compo and jam, but the underlying model is trained on all comments combined (which may or may not be a good idea). Here we go:
LD30 Compo predictions, ranked ~149th or better (208 total):
meeech, b5cully, hectormorlet, Ludorverr, Xaychru04, ENDESGA, teoacosta, 7Soul, Corné Dorrestijn, mactinite, Peping, headchant, bentog, Managore, Sanguine, Ping78, plash, muriel, Lord Draficus, InfamousIntellectual, EMAK, ReactorScram, brokenbeach, egor-idiot, NostraDamon, Kiwiboi, Conk, MerlijnVH, Domantas, Aru Nyan, Robinerd, Fanatrick, commanderstitch, gillenew, Logan, JetL33t, TheMorfeus, pusheax, PaperBlurt, pythong, StrideWide, Joe Williamson, 01010111, NiceAlexanderAS, pinkmonkeyhead, vinhuman, manabreak, ShaunJS, MagnesiumNinja, CRAZEERUSKEE, hungyg, xviniette, thedeadlybutter, Hozar, ice cold muffin, AdventureIslands, Tom 7, varun, DJWizardCop, From Smiling, Jaloko, Dietrich Epp, Bronaldplo, atomic_swerve, Skills641, primaerfunktion, SteveSalmond, Cherno, MintArcade, Steve, nonetheless, Cell, jurnacsr, Donar, Hypnohustla, Lvyn, neosam, Digiraze, ncannasse, bazld, Jace_Fyrestorm, Aaants, Bernte, JaJ, bigbadwofl, siat, remmy, Gareth Jenkins, sockfolder, Kavehes, jellonator, Ditto, anserran, Miziziziz, alastairbreeze, EndingChaos, smizmeal, jwin, rooter4, renatopp, Josh H, badlydrawnrod, Lyszie, tillrobby, DragonXVI, suve, rynti, khahem, Ellian, cardboard, Draknek, pirate-rob, Damian Schloter, TobiasW, Lars-Kristian, Pat AfterMoon, Nuclear Napalm, yodamaster, ratking, Turkey, duncankeller, lectvs, Alexandre Szybiak, Sequenceko, pfeyffer, boddiul, Otopkin, 0x0961h, Xgor, Ervin, markusfisch, elliottd, pekuja, Jellycakes, Nanofus, gardenhead, esayitch, jimmymcmillan, Healthire, Vandash, Inateno, v23v, Silveryard, zillix, GreenyUk, TrickFishPie, zatyka, HawkSandwich, ShadowStryker, jahlgren, vicious_br, eatsleepindie, rubna, Lazdo, synchingfeeling, technocf, cleitoneldorn, ianh, SaintHeiser, lucienpro, MRvanderPants, Zylann, Jogy34, MentaL13, Larzan, frosty, Jake Coxon, TautNerve, deepnight, PapaCheech, Krimble, FurtherForm, tatmos, BuffaloPhil, hate-marina, donut345, Split82, kaitokidi, vandriver, Namide, Kedume Bits, diamondgfx, modbox, Gaeel, Andrew Shouldice, KingBolonzo, Martins, Whoosy, Teesquared, simonnaus, PixelMind, xrm0, Laralyn, AdamHarte, NickZangus, BinRoot, Jezzamon, invi, kebabskal, Josh Riley, whalebot, Pirate Hearts, shimage, OnlySlightly, nesis, capsizedmoose, meishijie, AncientAvocado
LD30 Jam predictions, ranked ~106th or better (169 total):
Finlal, Cryunreal, stasss, SecondDimension, Animefrikis, catchthefloaty, Talvara, danbo, jgthespy, Cad, PaperboxStudios, Cryovat, dustyroom, mtrc, McFunkypants, Liz England, phasebeta, BoaHeck_ArtGent, Andrew Adams, OrangeeZ, MicroChasm, Yword, bytegrove, AtomicVikings, rogueNoodle, chrupp, Vidd, Allchimik, TGL, hadesfury, riv_roy, Evil Scotsman, RhythmLynx, commodoreKid, oakus, sandbaydev, InfectionTeam, IsaacL.Balogh, leafo, bluemaroo3, Creative Sectors, RawboSaurX, Spang, Magdev, Stals, TeamEagle, kristof, Shide, Oxeren, SkyWolf, borgi, Wertle, ix, ponk, Squidtank, chas, jimmypaulin, mysterycjgamer, sprawl, Matt Thorson, ColdBrain, danidre14, mechabit, tove, Dayko, orbitantlers, Zathnic, Robotic, PowerSpark, ZYXer, Will Edwards, Ted Brown, radmars, Two Scoop Games, Bognet Team, Seraphic Media, SoulGame, gnx, Cheesefork, pokepetter, Fre, 3CGames, graebor, Razoric, reecpj, hbocao, oxysoft, bushmango, Once Upon a Team, Kojan, Yoni, braqoon, Robber, PillowPigGames, guimonpa, Follett, Floko, KevinZuhn, Oddly Shaped Pixels, Adam Thompson, Nooner Bear, LeafThief, Hemuuuli, spotco, jjhaggar, 01F0, akolokgame, leafarz, Patacorow, spolsh, Budda, Tesrym, ticlekiwi, RevoLab, Literal Games, akymos, Lianne Booton, 01101101, Carduus, rustybroomhandle, Volute, Cosrnos, dook, ExtreLime, ponywolf, GrooveMan, Thepattybeast, Schrodinger Games, Jon Fisch, Benjamin, NikB, OxyOxspring, Lissar, Danman9914, jordanbloemen, Crosstales, nerd burglars, brookman, RandomNameGenerator, Simplexcity, toinfiniityandbeyond, George, BradSmallPlanet, _Rilem, bluesky, villhest, samooJAM, popcorn897, imaginarymonsters, Snoother, sudorossy, Team Klappermann, Arakade, Slikker, Kerdelos, pansapiens, Raphy, goosetickler, Jean Phenix, MunkeeBacon, moomoo112, banana4life, TravisChen, liquidminduk, nataku92, stink123456, Traumendes_Madchen, BasmanovDaniil, Mase
Based on the previous real-world test, about half of these predictions should be correct.
If your name is here, chances are people made really positive comments on your entry, irrespective of where it finally ranks. My own view is that everyone who finishes a game is a winner – some just have a little more win than others
Tags: predictions
The results are coming in soooon :>. In the meantime, anyone wanna play a fast paced twin-stick shooter (The keyboard is one stick, the mouse is the other so I think it counts) ?
Wanted to make a gif of the gameplay, but I messed that up :<
Countdown is running and time is flying so I’ll just take advantage of the 6 last hours to make some advertising for Alienscape.
If you’ve always wanted to play a platformer while working on you spatial geometry skills, this game is for you.
You have two 2d views to reconstruct the 3d environment and escape from the aliens that captured you !
Will you be bold enough ? Let’s try this out : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=30088 !
Commander, it has come to our attention that the Empire of Waaagh, The Council and even the Simian Alliance are gathering troops near our planet!
We must act now!
We must strike first!
We must do this for the God Emperor!
ONWARDS TO VICTORY!
(Commander, if you are reading this, please click on the UEF logo.)
…but first invite a friend or two. It’s dangerous to go alone!
The rating period is slowly but surely nearing its end, and I thought it cannot hurt to write a postmortem for the game I made three weeks ago. I wish I would’ve promoted the game more (it’s my first online multiplayer game after all!) and I wish I could’ve played more games, but my master’s thesis was jealous and demanded I spent more time with it. That being said, I have a free minute now, so here goes nothing!
Three weeks ago, when I was still young and inexperienced, I thought that “Connected Worlds” lends itselfs perfectly well to making an online multiplayer game. (Nevermind that I never did one before, haha.) That being said, there are some obvious design problems that I needed to solve – and that ultimatly led to the current design:
Okay, so a scalable drop-in/drop-out co-op online multiplayer game. This is basically what I spent my complete first day on, and I had no idea what I actually wanted to do gameplay-wise yet. I implemented a chat though: Just text that appears on top of player’s heads.
After a good night’s sleep, I arrived at the idea spawning from the Olypmic torch relay: A flame had to be transported from A to B – in this case between two kingsdoms. Slowly everything clicked together: It was dark, hence the flame is important. If you drop it, it’s not protected anymore and slowly dies down, and you have to drop it sometimes because it’s heavy as hell. And there are multiple obstacles that you have to dig through or build across. You can do it alone if you react fast, but it’s stressful always to drop the flame, dig/build a little, pick it up again, transport it, drop it etc. – it’s much better with friends helping you! So yeah, here we go – a game that you can play alone or with “any” number of friends.
The game is made in Unity and with the SDK from (and hosted by) Yahoo Game Networks. Free hosting for up to 5000 daily users? Yes please.
There is a server, but it doesn’t do much – it mainly keeps track of the users, items on the floor and already dug-out rocks so that it can inform new players. It also distributes events. The only thing that it is really authorative about is when an item is spawned, picked up or dropped to avoid item duplication.
On the client side, you are the only player that moves directly – and you send messages to the server how you move. Because movement is between tiles, those messages are few, and they will arrive in roughly the same interval in which they are send, so on the other screens you move the same way, just with a delay. Each player object has an event queue – move, dig, build bridge etc – that will be executed in that order with the appropriate delays, so it’s no problem if messages arrive to quickly either.
Making the server mostly non-authorative and using that message queue system is what helped me be able to finish the game in such a short time, I think.
Apart from that, I’m actually largely content! Sure, there’s not that much gameplay, but it’s fun – and sure, the graphics could be better, but hey! 48 hours and first time online multiplayer! I’m certainly not complaining. Which leads me to…
…I’m quite happy with the result, and I’m seriously considering doing a game with online components for next LD too. So much inspiring online stuff this LD, damn! And maybe I’ll even get a chance to gather more networked multiplayer experience by then, but knowing me, I won’t and I’ll just dive right in. Wouldn’t have it any other way, really.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments or on Twitter!
And maybe you have a free minute or two and want to try my game? (And maybe ask a friend to join you! Friends are pretty cool.)
Thanks for reading! I’m done here, goodbye.
Tags: post-mortem, postmortem, tips
Hey everyone! Voting is about to end soon and I’m getting excited. So many talented people!
After some time of absence, I’m really glad I could participate again. It was a rather spontaneous decision, and I also stepped out of my comfort zone this time around. But all the more did I learn!
I wasn’t too familiar with tools like Blender or Unity, but I really wanted to make this happen, so I just went for it. And it went surprisingly well! However, within the final hours I ran into problems exporting the game (that’s what you get for using unfamiliar tools, haha), which wasted all the extra time I saved for adding sound effects and actual enemies. But I’m still satisfied with the result, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too
